JIRA Description Field is not saving formatting

Question

In our JIRA instance, we have certain members of our team who are using the JIRA description field in greater detail than others.

This includes bullet points, number formatting, colors, indentations, etc.

There is an issue with the saving or editing of this information in the description field. It works very intermittently, sometimes the colors will work when you want to change them, other times they will not change color and when you save the item it will only change the color of one item and not the other. There are also instances where it will then mess-up the number formatting or bullets of a different item and it will display the HTML tags instead of the actually visual display.

Is anyone else having this issue? For different groups in our organization, this is a huge issue as it causes things to constantly be incorrect and will often take multiple edits before it sometimes works.

We are on JIRA Server 7.8.1 and will be upgrading to 8.4 tomorrow night. We are also using Windows 10 machines, and in the Google Chrome browser.

Any help and/or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

John Tocco · Answer

Any other thoughts on this? I am aware of the two modes and we are not doing any copy/pasting from other formats.

It's really odd, sometimes the formatting saves and other times it doesn't. Sometimes the whole word will be red like you selected and other times it's just half the word, has anyone ever had problems like this and those mentioned in my original post?

Andrew Laden · Answer

A few thoughts.

The description field editor has 2 modes. You can select which you are using by clicking at the bottom of the editbox.

* Visual, which works in a wysiwyg method
* Text, which gives you more control by allow you to work with the markup directly

You may be seeing behavior difference depending on which mode they are using

Jira sometimes remembers your last setting, so they should verify which setting they are in.

Also, are they trying to cut and paste from Word (or similar) to create the descriptions? While the cutting and pasting from Word is ok, there are some things that just work work. MS word's markup is different from the wiki markup that Jira uses.